Becoming Woman
Becoming Woman
Simone de Beauvoir and Drugi pol in Socialist Yugoslavia
Simone de Beauvoir’s famous dictum (“One is not born, but rather becomes, woman”) and The Second Sex appeared in Serbo-Croatian translation (Drugi pol translated by Zorica Milosavljević and Mirjana Vukmirović) in 1982 in Yugoslavia. Socialist Yugoslavia and Yugoslav feminists at the time were an important exception to the trends and ideologies of both the Cold War East and West. In Yugoslav socialism, the meaning of “woman” was shaped by the Yugoslav government’s pursuit of the “women’s emancipation” project assigning women the triple role of mother, worker, and comrade. Despite this socialist project, Beauvoir’s Drugi pol was welcomed by Yugoslav feminists who denounced the continued patriarchal treatment of women under Yugoslav socialism. For these Yugoslav feminists, Beauvoir’s writing exposed the social construction of “nature” as the foundation for women’s subordination. The shifting meaning of “woman” and renewed women’s subordination in a post-socialist society only served to confirm the continued relevance of Beauvoir’s dictum.
Keywords: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Drugi pol, Serbo-Croatian translation, socialist Yugoslavia, Yugoslav feminists, women’s emancipation project
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
